Author: jeff

Williamsport, Pa. — “We acknowledge that the land on which we live, work, and learn is the ancestral home of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks and the Lenni Lenape (Delaware),” said Pennsylvania College of Technology in a Land Acknowledgement Statement issued last week.

Pennsylvania College of Technology created an institutional Land Acknowledgement Statement to recognize the Indigenous people who lived where the campus now resides.

According to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian: “Land Acknowledgment is a traditional custom that dates back centuries in many Native nations and communities. Today, Land Acknowledgments are used by Native peoples and non-Natives to recognize Indigenous peoples who are the original stewards of the lands on which we now live.”

“We acknowledge that the land on which we live, work, and learn is the ancestral home of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee, Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks and the Lenni Lenape (Delaware). We, too, recognize their Woodland Period ancestors,” the acknowledgement reads. “We are grateful for their stewardship and management of this land over thousands of years and promote this recognition in honor and respect of that caretaking.”

The Penn College community notes the importance of understanding and appreciating the long-standing history of the land, and seeking to understand its place within that history in order to chart a better path forward.

“We value the over 100-year history of our institution,” the Land Acknowledgement webpage continues. “And we should value the 16,000 years of history that came before us and prepared the land for the education we now provide.”

The statement and supporting material, linked from the college website’s “About” section, was developed in conjunction with a campus-wide committee that included input from faculty, staff and students.

“At Penn College, we take great pride in the history of our institution’s successful outgrowth from our community, which is celebrated on…

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To the editor:

How fortunate we are to have vigilant citizens like Alex Sprague to awaken the oblivious among us to the historical implications of our city street names, like Lee Street. Sprague, who appears to have lived in Alexandria all of five years and does not live in Old Town, nevertheless professes to have “always loved this town.” He says his campaign to rename our streets is “only the beginning of a magnificent fight for equality and awareness.”

Sprague didn’t explain how renaming Lee Street would accomplish either of those things. His friend and fellow street name activist, Huayra Forster, proposes to rename Lee Street “Wanishi Street” in honor of the Piscataway and Lenape Tribes, the latter whose historical territory, according to Wikipedia, included Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York City, Long Island and the Lower Hudson Valley – but not Virginia.

Today, the Lenape people live in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario, Canada. It is unclear how renaming a street in Old Town Alexandria will help the Lenape people, who never lived here, achieve “equality.”

As for the fight for “awareness,” my wife and I lived on South Lee Street for 31 years. Of course we were aware of who the street was named after, but it was just our street and not a constant conscious reminder of our nation’s fraught racial history, the Civil War or Robert E. Lee’s role in it.

Erasing the name will do nothing to create the awareness Sprague presumably wishes to foster. Cancellation is not education. Decades from now, Wanishi Street would evoke no…

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